The use of geospatial imagery has continued to increase in recent years. As such, high quality geospatial imagery has become increasingly valuable. For example, a variety of different entities (e.g., individuals, governments, corporations, or others) may utilize geospatial imagery (e.g., satellite imagery). As may be appreciated, the use of such satellite imagery may vary widely such that geospatial images may be used for a variety of differing purposes.
In any regard, due to the nature of image acquisition, a number of geospatial images may be pieced together to form an orthomosaic of a collection of geospatial images that cover a larger geographic area than may be feasibly covered with a single acquired image. In this regard, it may be appreciated that the images that form such a mosaic may be acquired at different times or may be acquired using different collection techniques or parameters. In this regard, there may be differences in the images to be used to generate a mosaic (e.g., radiometric distortion). As such, when generating a mosaic, differences in the images may become apparent to users (e.g., discontinuous color changes or the like).
In this regard, mosaic generation has included manual selection of images by a human operator. Generally, the human operator is tasked with reviewing all available images for an area of interest and choosing images for inclusion in the mosaic utilizing what the human user subjectively determines to be the “best” source images. The subjective determinations of the human user are often guided by a principle that it is preferential to include as few images in the mosaic as possible. In turn, a mosaic may be generated utilizing the human-selected images to form the mosaic.
As may be appreciated, this human operator-centric process may be time consuming and costly. Moreover, the image selection is subjective to the human user. Further still, even upon the selection of an image for inclusion in a mosaic, there may still be radiometric distortions apparent that may be unsatisfactory to a user or purchaser of the geospatial mosaic image.